NO MONEY DOWN, INTEREST FREE FOR A LIFETIME ARCHITECTURE!

 

 

    Towards a mediocre architecture

     By Vincent-Christopher II

 

    Philippe Rahm's approach for the argument for meteorological architecture is a sham. It is the laziest approach to being critical of historical/current built work. Every argument that begins with,"...to shift our focus away from a purely visual and functional approach...," is horse shit. No one does this! Humans had an approximately 150 year stint of building, pre-industrial revolution to the contemporary built environment, where checks balances of the global environment we occupy, went unsupervised. This lack of supervision did an incredible amount of irreversible damage in a short period of time. The a few primary contributors to global change which include but are not limited to: CO2 changing the chemical constituency of the atmosphere and oceans, plastics in water and the ground, pollution in general via mineral, material, and fossil fuel excavation. Prior to the industrial, most building built was seen as tool to support the human condition throughout life. There may have been quite of bit of "overweight" in their use of materials, energy and labor but this typically did not happen en masse. There were a lot of failed experiments and dry mining but the industrial revolution changed all of this. By democratizing access through mass manufacturing, supply far exceeded demand and created a wasteland. However, Zach Si's comment," A green building is a standing building," is more in line with reality than reducing the whole of Architecture Theory and Practice to a purely visual and functional approach. Investing time, effort, and energy into figuring out how to keep buildings standing and adapting them for reuse to reduce greenhouse emissions in the built environment is a far better approach to the argument. The key threshold for tearing a building down and building brand new might be when the delta cost of repair + maintenance is greater than the delta of environmental extraction + energy + labor for a new build. It is a very slippery slope to even approach an argument about global climate change through aesthetics or functionalism. Has he forgotten pre-industrial building operated without systems integration such as HVAC, electricity, natural gas? Has he forgotten most buildings are not designed nor built by architects?
No, he's an architectural scholar. It was just cheaper metabolically to remove the context from the argument for an easy agreement. This, no money down, approach to an argument about architecture is one of the key reasons why there are arguments we do not need architects. Maybe its just me....

TL:DR Arguments for architecture being purely visual and functional are tired.